Well, if you are interested I outlined how a system would work. (But not perfected.) If you want I can go further. (But now I have to sleep.)

Plagiarizing myself:

sokuban wrote:Wow, this thread exploded while I wasn't here.

Anyways, you all are missing one big reason why Japanese romaji doesn't work. It is because the Japanese language is full of syllables, not consonants. There are tons of words that would have only a single letter difference if they were written in romaji. In English if you make a typo for one letter, usually you'd be able to understand the word, but in Japanese if you make a typo - heck, even if you don't make a typo it is hard to read romaji because you need to pay attention to every little letter in order to catch what the whole word is.

The homophones stuff is bull actually. Japanese can (kinda) be used avoiding these homophones, which are all derived from Chinese. Spoken Japanese generally uses more "Japanese Japanese", while written Japanese generally can use more "Chinese Japanese". Writing the pitch accent would be mad though. I don't notice the pitch accent, I know it is there but I don't think about it, it just comes. Most people would have difficulty writing the pitch accent if they had to. That, and the pitch accent is different from the East and the West.

As for the writing system, yea, it is like that, and it isn't exactly ideal, but it is the best you can get I guess.

I personally believe that hangul could be adopted for use with Japanese though, and it could work out quite nicely. When I say adapted, I mean adapted though. You'd have to make a different orthography in order to let each Chinese Character take up one square. Here is an example of my idea:

*disclaimer* This system is far from perfect, and I'm just giving ideas of how it could work. I also haven't even thought about how "Japanese Japanese" would be written in this system, only "Chinese Japanese".

Hangul has more vowels than Japanese. You can use some of them as the long vowels, and some of the short vowels. In my example, ㅗ is the same as Japanese "ou" and ㅓ is the same as Japanese "o". Likewise, ㅔ is the same as Japanese "e" and ㅐ is the same as Japanese "ei".

Also, you need to put the second part of the character on the bottom, rather than making it written in two blocks like Japanese. Since hangul has more consonants, I can use ㄱ to mean a Japanese "ku" and ㅋ to mean a Japanese "ki". (At the end of a Chinese Character syllable.) In this example I'm using ㅆ to mean a Japanese "tsu".

I'm also trying to keep the spelling as morphophemic as possible. Even though 発射 is pronounced "hassha" and not "hatsusha", I'm still writing the ㅆ at the bottom because it is a part of the character. Readers will be expected to read it out loud as "hassha" even though there is a ㅆ at the bottom. This is the normal way Korean is written as well. However, the next word, you can see is "happyou". This pronunciation is changed quite a bit from "hatsuhyou" that would be read if you read it out normally. I'm still writing it as 핬효 though to keep the morphophemic spelling. Actually I'm still debating over this stuff. One big difference between Japanese and Korean is that in Japanese: h, b, and p are related, while in Korean ㅂ and ㅍ are not related to ㅎ. So using the ㅎ jamo in Japanese is a bit odd. I'll think of a better way to do this one day. I could use ㅍ to represent the h sound in Japanese, but this would drive people who know Korean mad. So the current plan is to make ㅎ related to ㅂ and ㅃ, and not use ㅍ at all.

I have adapted Hangeul to write Spanish. I had to change some the sounds of particular letters completely because Korean sounds are really different from the Spanish phonology system which is quite short. So I used some of the Korean vowels to write Spanish diphtongs, two different letters for /l/ and /r/ since in Spanishe they can't be interchangeable at all and so on. Apart from those changes, which may confuse a person who already knows Korean, I think the system is "usable".

Nop, well, that's what I thought at first, but I don't really like my handwriting so I tried to fix it to make it usable in a normal Korean keyboard. So what I did is to use letters whose sounds don't exist in Spanish to represent other sounds (quite arbitrarily in some cases). And then for double letters like "rr" or "ll" which represent a particular sound in Spanish but are easily understandable to any native as two letters repeated, I used the Korean solution for a /l/ sound between two vowels. There are still some problems with the keyboard because of some consonant clusters but I usually write them using 으 (with the corresponding consonant) as in Korean. In fact Spanish orthography is quite phonetic so I just changed some things (for example, I merged into one c/k/q representing /k/ sound), but I left "h" which is silent (and useless in Spanish except for etymological questions). I also use a ' symbol to represent Spanish accent, some people may think that it is also useless, but I like it xD. For "ñ" I use n+y just as in Catalan.I don't know how, but I've lost the notebook where I wrote all the notes about this hangeul adaptation, when I find out where it is I'll post the whole system

Remd wrote:And then for double letters like "rr" or "ll" which represent a particular sound in Spanish but are easily understandable to any native as two letters repeated, I used the Korean solution for a /l/ sound between two vowels.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't simply use /l/ + /y/ for /ʎ/. After all, this combination is already pronounced with palatalisation in such Korean words as 열량 /yellyang/ "calorie". (A més s'usava a vegades "ly" i "yl" per a representar /ʎ/ en el català pre-estàndar.)

It's a shame it's not easier to type obsolete Hangul characters. ㅿ would make a reasonable substitute for /ɾ/, ㆄ could be used for /f/, and so forth.

I actually know nothing about the Korean language apart from hangeul, so my adaptation is rather arbitrary (and I did it just because I like the shape of the characters and the way they fit together). I only wanted it to be coherent itself independently of the real Korean orthography. But anyway, in Spain (and also in American Spanish) it is quite normal to pronounce "ll" exactly like "y", and only in some areas the palatal sound is maintained, so this orthography is kept (at least for most people) because of etymology, so it depends on how important you think etymology is (well, anyway it is not going to become a standard writing system so you can write it they way you feel more confortable xD. But I think that a lot of things could be changed. In fact, I already use ᄑ for "f", and the problem is "v" (which is also etymological in Spanish because it is pronounced like "b") and I write it with ᄑ+ᄒ, which is a bad solution, I suspect.